If an about-to-retire police chief falls out of an office chair and no one is around to hear the commotion, does he still get to file for a disability-enhanced pension?

You bet his brass badge he does. In California, unusually high pension payouts for law enforcement officials who were right at the ends of their careers even developed a nickname — “chief’s disease” — among other police officers after a fall from a chair was one of the pension-spiking injuries claimed by the then-California Highway Patrol commissioner, D.O. “Spike” Helmick.

Fifteen years ago, as the Calpensions website reporter Ed Mendel writes, Sacramento Bee journalists were then stymied in their efforts to look into other top-ranking CHP retirements similar to Helmick’s when the CalPERS system would only give them the amount of government employees’ pensions, refusing to say if any were disability retirements.

So John Hill and Dorothy Korber compiled on their own a different data base of compensation claims and then wrote a series of stories that let to reforms and arrests.

One reason the state has been able to block Californians from learning how government workers get such handsome retirement payouts is that divulging any information about them has been deemed as violating their healthcare privacy.

Now Transparent California, that helpful website that lists the pay and pension of all state and local government employees, has sued to force CalPERS to identify retiree pensions as simply either “service” or “disability.”

Sounds fair, right? But, absurdly, even that “would unlawfully deprive members of their individual right to decide whether to disclose their confidential medical information,” Amy Morgan, CalPERS spokeswoman, told Mendel.

But there’s nothing deeply medical about the one-word descriptions. Fighting this access to information is just another way of obfuscating about how pensions have spiked in recent decades.

The lawsuit, showing how publicly identifying retirement could help curb fraud, noted a citizen tip prior to a court-ordered recovery of $203,876 from a former state hospital worker.

Stop this secrecy before yet another police chief falls from his dangerous office chair.

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